"I checked. Sharon's a former naval officer, she'll get called up, too." The silver-haired officer leaned back and watched his former and hopefully future subordinate's reaction through the fragrant smoke.

"Jesus Christ on a crutch, Jack!" Mike shouted, throwing up his hands in frustration. "What about Michelle and Cally? Who takes care of them?"

"That is what one of the teams at this conference will be working on," said Horner, waiting for the inevitable reaction to subside.

"Can Sharon and I get stationed together?" asked Mike. He motioned for and caught the tossed lighter and relit the Ramar. For the first time in three years he took a deep draw on a cigar and let the nicotine bleed some of the tension off. Then he blew out an angry stream of smoke.

"Probably not. . . . I don't know. None of that has been worked out, yet. Everything is on its ear right now and that's what this conference is about: straightening everything out." Horner looked around for a moment then made an ashtray out of a sheet of paper. He flicked his developing ash into it and set it in the middle of the conference table.

"What gives? I know, you can't tell me, right? OPSEC?" Mike studied the glowing end of his cigar then took another draw.

"I can't and I won't play twenty questions." General Horner stabbed the conference table with a finger and pinned his former subordinate with a glare. "Here's the deal," he continued, blowing out another fragrant cloud. The room had rapidly filled with cigar smoke. "This conference will last three days. I can hold you as a tech rep, for a really stupid amount of money, for the conference, maybe a week. But that is only if you agree to take a commission now. Further, we'll be locked in for quite a while afterwards, maybe a couple of months and any communications with home will be monitored and censored. . . ."

"Hold it, you also didn't say anything about a goddamn lock-in!" Mike snapped, his face stony.

"Debate is not allowed about the lock-in so don't even go there, it's been ordered by the President. Or you can go home and in a few months get orders to report to Benning as a sergeant." Jack leaned back and softened his tone. "But if you come on board now Sharon will get the tech rep check in a week—I can disburse it out of Team funds—and after that you'll be making O-2's salary and benefits including medical and housing, and so on." Jack cocked his head and waited for an answer.

"Sir, look, I'm working on a career here. . . . " Mike twiddled the cigar and contemplated the top of the conference table. He found himself unable to meet Horner's gaze.

"Mike, do not kick me in the teeth. I would not have requested you if you were stupid. I will make this as plain as I can within the limits of my orders: I need you on my team." He stabbed the table again. "Not to put too fine a point on it, your country needs you. Not writing science fiction or making web pages, but doing science fiction. Our kind."

"Doing . . . ?" Then it hit him. The other writer specialized in naval sagas. Space naval sagas, not "wet" navy.

Mike closed his eyes. When he opened them he was staring into a set of blue eyes as cold as the deep between the stars.

* * *

Ft. Bragg, NC Sol III

0911 EDT March 16th, 2001 ad

The secure phone on the broad wooden desk of the commander, Joint Special Operations Command, buzzed and he tossed the file he was annotating onto the pile of similar documents.

"JSOC—" pronounced Jay-Sock "—General Taylor." The room was tastefully decorated with an impressive "I love me" wall of battle decorations, paintings of notable battles and commission photographs. The carpeting was deep, rich blue and the wallpaper was matching but the view was pure walls. The room resided deep within a featureless concrete building, one of several, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Joint Special Operations Command was founded out of disaster. During the Tehran Hostage Crisis, the inability of the services to coordinate was critical in the debacle at Desert One. Special operations require depths of coordination and training that the regular services could not supply. As just one example, the forecasters for Desert One were not told precisely where the flights would go and, therefore, could not warn the planners about the dust storms the helicopters encountered. The Marine pilots, while capable and valiant to a normal level, were under-trained for a mission of that intensity, leading to the "pilot error" crashes at the site and other failures.

These critical failures of communication, intelligence and training, the cornerstones of any military, crystallized a movement to centralize the various services' special operations groups under one umbrella organization. Joint Special Operations was the child of that movement. It was from JSOC that such high-quality actions as the Special Forces and Ranger raids in Panama, the Force Recon insertion into Baghdad and the SEAL diversion during the assault in Desert Storm drew their planning and implementation.

Now, the Joint Special Operations Command was a mature unit, ready to provide the right forces at the right time for special operations anywhere on the globe. But they were about to be tasked for a mission outside those parameters.

"General Taylor, it's Trayner," said the cold voice on the phone.

"And what can JSOC do for the Vice Chief of Staff, today?" asked General Taylor, leaning back and staring unseeing at the picture on the far wall: a line of blue-clad soldiers charging out of a mist against a similar line of soldiers clad in gray.

"It's an awkward tasking," said the VCA. "I need one of your people. I'm going to give you the specifications and you tell me who I need. Also, this should be obvious since I'm stepping all over procedure, this is as `black' as it gets. Are we clear on that?" "Black" operations are so secret sometimes they never happened. There are no records and no reports, only results. Politicians, even presidents, hate black operations.

"Capice, sir," the commander replied, wondering what the fuss was. This was SOCOM's meat and drink. "What are the specifications for this oh-so-special individual?" he asked. He picked up a letter opener off his desk and started to balance it on the tip of his index finger.

"NCO or officer," continued the VCA, "to put together a team, mono-service or joint, for unspecified reconnaissance in hostile territory and environment outside the continental United States."

Taylor scratched the back of his neck and changed his stare to the picture of a tropical beach on his desk. A much younger, bronzed Taylor had his arm around the waist of a skinny laughing blonde. He appeared to be trying to cop a feel. "That's pretty damn vague General, except the `hostile' part." He flipped the letter opener in the air. It landed point down in a cork target just to the left of his monitor, obviously placed there for that very reason. He paid it no attention, assuming the letter opener knew where it was going.

"Don't fish, Jim," snapped the VCA. "This is as black as midnight; that's straight from National Command Authority, the President. It wasn't even from the SECDEF or SECARMY, they're out of the loop. I was given this tasking personally by the NCA."